The key recommendation is: the entire scientific community should broaden itsawareness that bioterrorism threats now include, for example, newapproaches for manipulating or killing a host organism or forproducing synthetic micro-organisms, the report says. "U.S. nationalbiodefense programs currently focus on a relatively small number ofspecific agents or toxins, but gains in biomedical understanding haveraised major concerns about the next generation of biowarfare agents,"said committee co-chair David A. Relman, associate professor ofmedicine and of microbiology and immunology, Stanford University,Stanford, Calif. "We need to expand our thinking about the nature offuture biological threats, as well as more fully exploit advances inthe life sciences to create a global public health defense that isagile and flexible.

The report recommends multidisciplinary measures to identify andmitigate such dangers over the next five to 10 years. The report, on"next generation" bioterrorism, was requested by the US government. Itconcludes that intelligence agencies are too focused on specific listsof bacteria and viruses, and are not aware of emerging threats.

Focusing on the list of about 60 "select agents", such as the smallpoxvirus and botulism toxin, might simply divert resources from newer andmore dangerous threats, such as RNA interference, synthetic biology ornanotechnology.

A photon trap. The heart of the detector, which has been around for a couple of years, is a wire 100 nanometers wide that meanders like coils on a refrigerator to increase the area of detection. The wire is cooled to just above absolute zero, at which temperature it becomes a superconductor. When a photon hits the wire and is absorbed, the wire heats up just enough to stop superconducting, creating a detectable jump in resistance.

In the new design, the photons that slip past or reflect off the wire bounce around in the photon trap, giving them more chances to be absorbed by the wire. The trap, with a little help from an antireflective coating, approximately tripled the efficiency of previous detection efforts.

Drop-off in the number of photons limits the range of quantum cryptography to 100-150 kilometers. But, according to Michael LaGasse, vice president of engineering at the Somerville, MA, labs of MagiQ, which is already commercializing quantum cryptography, a detector as efficient as Berggren's could double or triple these distances. Because of cost considerations, however, LaGasse says the new detectors are likely to find only niche markets, such as in military applications.

January 30, 2006

Giant wire spheres may one day float near Earth, scooping up bits of antimatter for humans to use as space fuel. This is one of 12 recently selected to each receive up to $75,000 from the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts. A plan is for antimatter to be collected using three concentric wire spheres. The outermost, spanning 16 kilometres, would be positively charged to repel protons from the solar wind and attract negatively charged anti-protons from space. These anti-protons would then slow down passing through the middle sphere and come to rest inside the smallest sphere, which would measure 100 metres in diameter. An electromagnetic field would trap the exotic particles there.

"Basically, what you want to do is generate a net, just like you're fishing," says Gerald Jackson, the project's principal investigator at Hbar Technologies in West Chicago, Illinois, US. About 80 grams of antimatter may float between the orbits of Venus and Mars, while as much as 20 kilograms could be harvested within Saturn's far-out orbit.